Wiscon panels I am on

[firecat]

These are the Wiscon panels I'm on. I've never been on a Wiscon panel before. I would welcome any comments about these panel topics and any ideas you would like to see addressed at these panels. And if you're at Wiscon I hope you come, but if there's something else fascinating going on at the same time, I hope some of you go to that instead, so I can find out what happened!


Romancing the Beast
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM, Conference 4
Moderator: Vito Excalibur. Panelists: Catherine Cheek, Stef Maruch, Heidi Waterhouse, Janine Ellen Young

Paranormal romance almost always features the hero as a paranormal being and the heroine as an ordinary human. How does this resonate with gender relations and power relationships in our society? And is it emblematic of women seeing men as Other?

I wanted to be on this panel because the disparity has always bugged me. To give an example that has nothing to do with paranormal romance, I refuse to see Cyrano de Bergerac in any form because I'm not aware of any gender-reversed version.


Dealing With Your Male Answer Syndrome
Sun 10:00 - 11:15AM, Assembly
Moderator: John H. Kim. Panelists: Suzanne Allés Blom, Moondancer Drake, John Helfers, Stef Maruch

Although it's not absolute, there's a strong tendency among masculine people to always want to have the definitive answer for everything, even if they don't necessarily know. In panels and elsewhere in life, it can be hard for men to admit they don't know things. Why is this? How can men deal with the pressure (either internal or external) to always have the right answer? How do women and other non–masculine folks deal with Male Answer Syndrome? If you think the answers to all these questions are obvious, then you need to come to this panel!

I wanted to be on this panel because it's All Answer Syndrome All The Time at my house...and the XY person in the relationship is not the only person participating. So I have experience from multiple sides. I also have funny stories and techniques that you'll want to know about!


Wish Fulfillment in Fiction
Sun 2:30 - 3:45PM, Assembly
Moderator: P. C. Hodgell. Panelists: Beth Friedman, Anne Harris, Stef Maruch, Caroline Stevermer

What is the role of wish fulfillment in fiction? If you're a writer, what personal wishes do you want your stories to fulfill? Are they the same ones you want to read about? How do our fictitious wishes affect our everyday dreams?

I wanted to be on this panel because I fundamentally don't get wish fulfillment fiction, and I think that has something to do with why I find it difficult to write fiction, so I hope to provide an alternate viewpoint and I also hope it will shake something loose.

The OH is envious that I get to be on a panel with P.C. Hodgell. (He isn't going to Wiscon this year.)

Comments

[flarenut]

MAS here: the tiny sample of paranormal romances I've seen (fingers of one hand) seem to go the other way -- woman as second-sighted or otherwise weird, man as either normal or also a closeted weird. But looking at those I think that a lot of it is about implicit viewpoint character and hence who has the authority to see someone else as Other, which makes sense with the way you're portraying things. The crucial thing is that having talent, in the usual storyline, both puts you up on a pedestal and makes you secretly broken in a way that only your Twoo Wuv can fix.

Cyrano: The Truth About Cats and Dogs?

[firecat]

Well said. Do you remember the titles of those paranormal romances?

I'm mainly aware of paranormal romances where everyone is paranormal. E.g., the Anita Blake series, the Underworld movies. The only one I know that fits the panel description is Beauty and the Beast.

Thanks for the movie tip.

[flarenut]

Ah, finally jogged my brain: a horrific piece of crap (with sequels) called "The Smoke Thief". This is what you get when your spouse reads from the local used book store. Neither of us could get more than 20 or 30 pages in.

Another data set would be time-travel romances (someone once put Sci Am on their review-copy list), which is a sort of subset of paranormal. Although for the plots to work it pretty much has to be the woman who is the traveler, so that the man can rescue her blah blah blah. (Diana Gabaldon would be the best-known version of this, although the men start getting the gift there too...)

I was also thinking of Doc Sidhe, although in a way that's not fair, because in a world where everyone is eldritch the mundane will be the marked one...

[firecat]

Oh yes, Diana Gabaldon...(I only got halfway through the first one, so I didn't get to the part where the men get the gift.)

Actually the classic Fairy Queen steals a young man story.

[trixtah]

I'm a bit puzzled that they're calling it "male answer syndrome". Ok, there might be some gender bias, but it's not that exclusive. I prefer "geek answer syndrome" (although perhaps that excludes people who don't consider themselves geeky!)

[firecat]

I tend to use geek answer syndrome myself, and I've also heard it called mother answer syndrome.

But there's a specific form of this behavior that some people argue is more common in men. It is described here: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174918 Quote:

So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again.

I think the panel is meant to discuss this kind of behavior as well.

[emceeaich]

Yes, the general form of this seems to be a lack of mindfulness.

Been there, done that, can't get rid of the t-shirt.

[firecat]

for a moment, before he began holding forth again.

It might start out as a lack of mindfulness but the quoted behavior seems like the dearth of mindfulness caused by squeezing your eyes shut, sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "LA LA LA."

[trixtah]

Heh, I just call that the "nobody exists but me" or "sexist prick" syndromes. It's interesting they're putting GAS together with the other thing(s), because to me they come from quite different places. One is feeling that you need to be authoritative or knowledgeable about stuff (I certainly know that one) and the other is more that you don't consider other people (of whatever class) have any opinions or input of merit. I suppose they can look the same, thought.

[firecat]

I think there are differences, but in some cases (not all) I also think there are similarities in motive, possibly along the lines of "I need to do this, or someone [possibly someone from my distant past, inside my head] will scoff at me and make me feel inferior."

[flarenut]

One of the things about classic MAS is that (like not asking for directions) it's strongly tied in with a certain kind of intellectual machismo (or insecurity if you prefer). It's not just about wanting to have the definitive answer to everything, but also about feeling that you're defective if you don't. Historically, I think the geek version may well come from the male version...

And of course, since men are stereotypically the ones in power, MAS sometimes also consists in causing one's answer to be the right one, whether it is or not. You see that in a certain kind of manager.

[firecat]

You see that in a certain kind of manager.

So true!

[snippy]

In Katherine Blake's "The Interior Life" the wife has fantastic daydreams that come alive and speak to her; the husband is mundane.

In Charlaine Harris's Grave Sight series the protag is a woman who can tell how corpses died and none of her romantic interests are anything but mundane (she has a different one in each book, kind of).

In Cherie Priest's series that starts with Four and Twenty Blackbirds has a women protag with supernatural powers but her romantic interests are mundane.

[snippy]

One more: Tamora Pierce's series about Bekka Cooper, who can talk to ghosts, but her romantic interest doesn't have any supernatural power as far as I know.

[firecat]

Thanks! I'll make a note of those.